Munch, Kirchner Artworks Return to Jewish Collector’s Heirs

By Catherine Hickley -
Nov 30, 2012

A Berlin museum will return three
graphics by Edvard Munch and one by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the
heirs of a collector who escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing to
the U.S., according to museum officials and the heirs’ lawyers.

Curt Glaser was director of Berlin’s Art Library and an art
critic who counted Munch among his friends. Persecuted for his
Jewish origins by the Nazis, he was suspended from his job and
evicted from his apartment in April 1933. He auctioned most of
his collection in May and left Germany in July that year.

Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett acquired six Munch drawings in
Glaser’s auction. Another five graphic works by Kirchner were
donated to the museum shortly after the auction, of which three
are still in the Kupferstichkabinett’s collection. Five works
will stay in the Berlin museum with the heirs’ approval, said
David Rowland of Rowland & Petroff in New York, their lawyer.

“The heirs are extremely pleased that they were able to
reach a fair and just solution,” Rowland said by telephone. The
agreement to leave some works in the Kupferstichkabinett
“acknowledges the importance of Glaser’s work in Berlin.”

Munch is today one of the most valuable artists at auction.
One of four versions of his masterpiece “The Scream,” a pastel
on board, sold for $119.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York in
May. Glaser’s collection comprised more than 100 graphics by
Munch as well as works by other modernist figures including
Kirchner, Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka, Old Master paintings
and a collection of Japanese graphics.

Friend, Patron

“As a friend and patron of the famous Norwegian painter
Edvard Munch, Glaser laid the foundation-stone for one of the
biggest and most significant collections of Munch’s graphics in
the Kupferstichkabinett,” the Prussian Cultural Heritage
Foundation, the organization that oversees Berlin’s museums,
said in a statement sent by e-mail.

The three Munch works that will be returned to the Glaser
heirs under this agreement are a mezzotint called “Young Girl
by the Sea,” a woodcut titled “Prayer of an Old Man” and an
etching, “Death and the Woman,” according to the statement.
The Kirchner work is a woodcut called “Peasants Chatting.”

Glaser was a leading figure in the Berlin art world of the
Weimar Republic. A qualified doctor, he converted to
Protestantism in 1914. His home was a meeting place for artists
and intellectuals. When he fled the country with his second wife
in 1933, he traveled first to Switzerland, and from there to
Italy and Cuba before reaching the U.S., where he died in 1943.
His heirs are the relatives of his wife, Marie Milch.

Duress Sales

The fate of their claims highlights diverging responses to
art sales made under duress in the Nazi era. Under postwar laws
for Germany crafted by the western allies, any art sales by Jews
after 1935 are presumed to have been under duress and are deemed
invalid.

Claims for artworks sold before 1935 are assessed on a
case-by-case basis. Glaser’s heirs have recovered works that he
sold in the Berlin auctions from the Netherlands, and from the
German cities of Berlin and Hanover.

The Dutch Restitutions Committee in 2010 recommended the
return to Glaser’s heirs of a painting by Jan van de Velde II
titled “Winter Landscape.” The committee said Dutch guidelines
consider all sales by private owners in Germany from 1933
onwards involuntary unless proven otherwise.

Yet the U.K. Spoliation Advisory Panel in 2009 rejected the
heirs’ claim for eight drawings held by London’s Samuel
Courtauld Trust auctioned under the same conditions. While
conceding that Glaser sold his collection at least in part due
to Nazi persecution, the panel said he was also keen to make a
fresh start after the death of his first wife, and received fair
prices for his artworks in a depressed market.

In 2008, the Swiss city of Basel also rejected the Glaser
heirs’ claim for more than 100 artworks by artists including
Munch, Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse.

“We hope the Berlin decision serves as a signal to other
museums which have other Glaser works and encourages them to
reach a similarly fair and just solution,” Rowland said.